Right Web

PRA's Right Web neither represents nor endorses any of the individuals or groups profiled on this site.

Frederick Kagan, along with father Donald and brother Robert, belongs to the influential neoconservative Kagan family, in the same vein as the Kristol and Podhoretz clans. Like his father and brother, Frederick favors hawkish foreign policies and extravagant defense budgets. He is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and is associated with the now largely defunct Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which his brother cofounded.

On January 5, 2007, Kagan published a widely noted AEI report on Iraq aimed at influencing the Bush administration's efforts to revamp its approach to the war. Titled "Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq," the AEI report argued that substantially increasing U.S. troop strength in Iraq is essential to avoiding a defeat that could lead to "regional conflict, humanitarian catastrophe, and increased global terrorism." Among the plan's proposals: a "surge of seven army brigades and Marine regiments to support clear-and-hold operations" beginning this spring, which would be aimed at securing "the Iraqi population and contain[ing] the rising violence"; lengthening the tours of ground troops and increasing deployments of National Guard forces; making a "dramatic increase in reconstruction aid for Iraq"; and mobilizing military industry "to provide replacement equipment" for troops.

The report was produced with the help of an AEI study group, called the Iraq Planning Group, which seemed directly aimed at countering the influence of the similarly named Iraq Study Group (ISG), a group of experts enlisted by the Bush administration in early 2006 to make recommendations to help resolve the growing problems with the Iraq War. The ISG, which was co-chaired by the realist-inclined former Secretary of State James Baker and former Rep. Lee Hamilton (D-IN), concluded in its long-awaited final report released in December 2006 that there was "no magic bullet" that could solve the debacle in Iraq. It argued that the United States needed to approach Iraq's neighbors, including Syria and Iran, as part of a "diplomatic offensive" aimed at easing tension in the region. And although it called for a short-term increase in the number of U.S. soldiers in Iraq, the increase would be largely devoted to training Iraqi soldiers, with the goal of bringing U.S. troops home by early 2008. (For more on the ISG, see Leon Hadar, "The Baker-Hamilton Recommendations: Too Little, Too Late?" Right Web analysis, December 12, 2006.)

The Baker-Hamilton report seemed to provide impetus for the neoconservatives, whose influence in policy circles began spiraling downward as the war in Iraq steadily worsened. In late 2006, AEI announced the creation of its own "planning" group, which was led by Kagan and retired Gen. Jack Keane. It also included about a dozen other AEI scholars (most notably Michael Rubin, Thomas Donnelly, Danielle Pletka, Gary Schmitt, and Reuel Marc Gerecht), as well several retired army officers and Michael Eisenstadt, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Its final report, authored by Kagan, was released with much fanfare at an AEI event on January 5, 2007. Among those speaking at the event were Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-CT), both closely associated with neoconservatives, and former honorary co-chairs of the now-defunct Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. AEI promises that it will release follow-up reports to Kagan's first installment.

Kagan participated in a PNAC study group that produced Rebuilding America's Defenses, a 2000 book that foreshadowed many of the defense policies adopted by the administration of President George W. Bush. He also contributed a chapter about the U.S. military for the 2000 PNAC volume Present Dangers, which was edited by Robert Kagan and William Kristol.

Kagan is a widely published expert on military affairs. His most recent book is Finding the Target: The Transformation of American Military Policy (Encounter Books, 2006), which received generous reviews in a number of outlets, including the New York Times, the Armed Forces Journal, and Foreign Affairs. The book fleshes out an argument widely repeated by many neoconservatives, including most notably AEI's Joshua Muravchik, that many of the troubles plaguing the military during the Bush administration stem from efforts to "transform" the armed forces by shifting to high-tech weapons-an effort that was vociferously championed by an erstwhile friend of the neoconservatives, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

In a review of the book for the New York Times, Barry Gewen writes that Kagan "is concerned with distinguishing genuine transformations from false ones. In Finding the Target he argues that what the Rumsfeld Pentagon has proclaimed as a technological revolution in military affairs is no such thing, and that this fundamental misconception has produced the debacle that is the Iraq War" (December 17, 2006). According to Gewen, "Kagan contends that the American military successfully transformed itself after the humiliation of Vietnam with the all-volunteer Army and upgradings of personnel and weapons, but then fell captive to dreams of dominance through technology alone, losing sight of the human component of warfare . By concentrating on raw power, especially air power, to the exclusion of politics and culture, the Bush administration has courted disaster and defeat in a region it never took the trouble to understand. 'Of all the enemies that shock and awe might be effective against, al-Qaida is absolutely not one,' Kagan writes; he goes on to explain: 'War is not about killing people and blowing things up. It is purposeful violence to achieve a political goal.' A military revolution that wasn't a revolution blinded Bush and Rumsfeld to this old-fashioned truth."

Kagan is also the coauthor, with his father, of While America Sleeps: Self-Delusion, Military Weakness, and the Threat to Peace Today (2000), which compares the United States at the end of the Cold War to post-World War I Great Britain, arguing that the United States is weak and vulnerable, and that it needs to greatly boost military spending. In a review of the book, University of Chicago scholar Bruce Cumings wrote: "The storm has been gathering for a decade, according to the Kagans, but in 1991 we failed to comprehend that we were at a critical turning point . It would indeed be one of the great ironies of modern times if 1991-the year the United States emerged from the Cold War as the only remaining superpower, outspending all conceivable adversaries combined on defense and launching an information revolution that would sweep the globe-was really the beginning of the end of American dominance. But the United States can still save itself, say the authors, if it spends more on defense and acquires loads of new weapons. This last message, which dominates the latter third of the book, seems to have been perfectly timed for the 2000 presidential campaign . There is one good thing about While America Sleeps: No one who reads it is going to run out and buy a flak jacket, teach kindergartners to 'duck and cover,' or restock a backyard bomb shelter. This is a book to assign to students who want to know what professors mean when they say 'a little history is a bad thing'" (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, March/April 2001).